Today’s cellphone generations lack common sense

“All I can hear: ‘I, me, mine; I, me, mine; I, me mine.'”

— The Beatles 

Somebody said to me the other day, “With the small staff you have now at The Herald, what would they do if something happened to you?”

And while I think the comment was meant as something of a compliment, I told the person what I know to be true: “If something happened and my tenure at this newspaper ended suddenly (and, no, that’s not something that’s imminent, as far as I know, despite some of your wishes) they would put out the next issue of the paper and the next one and the next one.”

There are people in this world — take our soon-to-be president, God help us, for example — who believe the world revolves around them, that somehow the Earth might slip off its axis if they weren’t around to keep things in balance.

Sorry, you people who think that way, you’re only fooling yourself. You would be missed by some — maybe even many — if you suddenly left this world, but, as the saying goes, “Life would go on.”

But there are a lot of people who don’t buy that. They’re certain that the world might come to an end without them in it. Democracies would crumble. Monetary systems would collapse. The outpouring of grief would be too much for the majority of people to handle.

Yes, we live in a very self-centered world, one in which egocentric parents “raise” their kids via cellphones. Said kids are not taught such trivial things as respect, etiquette, right from wrong. And, sure, these toddlers are thousands of times smarter than I when it comes to figuring out apps and how to make snarky comments about the people they don’t like. But common sense is a thing of the past. These little darlings who can create memes that generate thousands of views and likes can’t figure out how to come in out of the rain without step-by-step directions.

And it’s getting worse.

I went to an out-of-town restaurant recently, and seated at the table directly adjacent to the booth where I sat was what appeared to be an extended family that includes three kids under the age of 5. I was flabbergasted to see that all three kids spent the whole time I saw them staring at cartoon graphics and listening to cartoon music on what I can only assume were their parents’ cellphones, although in today’s society, it might be a parental norm to give kids younger than 5 their own cellphones.

Sure beats having to try and keep them occupied with something like, oh, I don’t know, educational activities, artistic endeavors or exercise.

I know when I say this that I sound like some prehistoric creature, but it’s something I hear from just about anyone who’s not a part of the two most recent generations: When we were young, the only time we came indoors during non-school hours was to eat or use the bathroom — the latter only if a handy tree didn’t suffice.

My brother and I would eat a piece of cheese toast, gulp down some orange juice and hit the front door running on Saturdays and all school’s-out summer days. We’d hop on our trusty bikes, take to the dirt roads in our neighborhood on the fly and pretty much keep ourselves amused until it got too dark to see and the mosquitoes came out.

Send today’s kids outside without some costly contraption that takes engineering skills to operate, and they’ll just stand there, wondering what they’d done wrong.

It’s this attitude that’s begun to permeate our society, that has people believing this world — like the ones they populate in their video games — is indeed their oyster, and it simply would not function without them. Leaving them overly ripe for an extremely rude awakening.